A Matter of Taste
by Collie Parkillo
Summary: Roger and Maurice make a deal, and as usual, Roger does not come out on top. AU. For Aurora.


Roger liked the library because it was quiet. Then again, so were corpses, and Roger didn't particularly like those because that meant that victims weren't screaming anymore. Okay, that was illegal, and despite what his classmates said about him, Roger Dressler was not a murderer.

However, Maurice's behavior often made him start considering that career.

"Roger, why don't you ever read anything in the YA section?" Maurice, as usual, was bouncing up and down as he spoke.

"Because everything in it is bullshit," he said bluntly, running his hands across the spines of the various books. "Besides, who wants to read about some girl falling for some guy and then some third guy and-"

"They're not all like that, silly! Don't you want to read about action or murder or something? Ooh, or how about death? There are lots of books with deaths in them! Sad deaths!"

"I'm fine with the horror section, thanks." Roger was about to meander out of the pitifully small YA section when Maurice practically jumped on top of him. "I can't even say I'm surprised anymore. The hell do you want?"

"Roger, let's make a deal!" The enthusiasm in Maurice's voice made Roger slightly afraid to know what he was proposing. The grin on his face was equally terrifying. "I'll read one of your dumb, totally un-scary horror books, and you read a nice, happy YA novel!"

Roger grimaced. "Why would we do that?"

"To get to know each other better!"

"We've been friends for five years."

"So? That doesn't mean there's no room for improvement!" Maurice beamed. "So how about it?" There was something about the look on Maurice's face that always made him extremely hard to say no to. It might have been how stupidly excited he always looked for the littlest things, so letting him down was kind of like kicking a small baby animal.

"Alright, fine." Roger sighed.

"Okay! You pick a book for me, and I'll pick a book for you!" Before Roger had a chance to react, Maurice had raced over to the bookshelf and grabbed something. "Here! It's called _The Fault in Our Stars._"

Roger looked dubiously down at it. Probably childish, clichéd, and stupid, like most young adult novels tended to be. He was definitely going to be making Maurice read_ The Shining._

When he returned home after fishing around in his bag for his copy of _The Shining_ and giving it to Maurice he set the book down on his desk and forgot about it for the majority of the evening.

Before going to bed, he finally picked it up. It was stupid from the first page, but it was kind of harmlessly stupid. Like, the kind of stupid that Roger's twenty-eight year old sister who still hadn't moved out tended to usually read where the two main characters fall hopelessly in love and then grow old together and all that crap.

_I'll just read for a little while before bed, he thought, settling down._

Five hours later, it was two in the morning, and Roger Dressler was crying.

Roger didn't cry very often, the last instance he could remember was in middle school when somebody stole his pocket knife that had cost a shitload of money. And now, here he was, at two in the morning, crying about a young adult romance novel.

Life just wasn't fair sometimes.

He put down the book, dabbing at his eyes with a tissue and snuffling obtusely. After a few minutes of rustling his blankets in an attempt to find his phone, he finally closed his hands around it and punched in Maurice's number.

It rang for about three minutes until Maurice finally picked up. "Roger, it's 2 AM." He, for once, didn't sound irritatingly energetic but exhausted. Roger grinned, then remembered why he was calling.

"You didn't tell me he'd die!"

"I thought you'd like that!" Roger cursed under his breath. "Oh my god, Roger, are you crying?" Maurice sounded ecstatic.

"No!"

"That means you liked it, Roger! _The Shining_ was really good, too! It wasn't scary at all!" Roger vaguely wondered how Maurice was practically yelling without his parents noticing. Who knew. You never knew with Maurice.

"Not even a_ little?" _Roger raised his eyebrows.

"Not even a little! I mean, Jack was kinda creepy and I wouldn't want him for my dad, but other than that, I was fine! I didn't cry or anything." Maurice giggled and Roger hoped that the phone static conveyed the hatred that was burning from his entire being. "You're not a heartless sadist after all! This is a breakthrough!"

Roger heard somebody opening the door over the phone and Maurice told his mother that he was talking to himself. Roger snorted. Maurice's mother would most likely believe that, considering the fact that she'd raised Maurice as a child. "Maurice, you really need to go back to bed."

"You know, Roger, Augustus kinda reminded me of you."

"I'm a fourteen-year-old boy who got kicked out of two schools and once got suspended for trying to cut off someone's finger in class. Augustus Waters is a seventeen-year-old who yells at a Dutch guy and then gets laid and then dies."

"Well, Augustus is sweet but makes really out of context jokes, and so do you! Remember that time you pretended that you were practicing cannibalism during lunch and everybody believed you? What I'm saying is, well, I think you're great and Augustus is great so you two are really alike!"

Roger grunted. "You've got to be shitting me." His attempts to keep himself from wryly smiling failed, and he thanked god that he wasn't having a face-to-face conversation with Maurice.

"That's Roger language for 'thank you, I appreciate you!', right?"

Roger's smile turned into a grin. "Maybe."

* * *

**i claim no ownership to lord of the flies. ooookk so i wrote this for my friend aurora/satan abraham's birthday today yeah! i took a really long time to decide what ship to write her so i wrote this at like 11 the night before so yeah my apologies that it's kinda short. happy birthday! **


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